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With Amazon's EC2, to assign an IP address I create an "Elastic IP", however it seems to just give me a static IP address. What is the difference between a static IP and an elastic IP? Or is it the same and just part of AWS's branding?

David542
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  • Is it really static and not someone that you assign dynamically in the UI? Clouds are not always as static as servers - so they may refer to the fact that you can ask for htem and release them in a moments notice. – TomTom May 20 '12 at 19:13
  • [Elastic IP Adresses docs](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/elastic-ip-addresses-eip.html) – Palec Sep 03 '15 at 14:04

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Amazon Guides are always a good reference to understand better the entire infraestructure. In Amazon EC2 Elastic IP Addresses you can read:

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or availability zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance associated with your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by programmatically remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

grosshat
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    Why do they call it "elastic"? – CMCDragonkai Mar 18 '15 at 03:39
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    @CMCDragonkai [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Elastic_Compute_Cloud) says: >A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic" So the dynamics payment is the reason. – Carolus Jun 07 '19 at 10:33